The Tribe is a collection of three novellas portraying
life in an extended Muslim Allawite Lebanese-Australian family, as seen by one
of its youngest members. The first novella describes the family house in the
Sydney suburb of Alexandria, and the three generations who live, often in some
discord, in its rooms; the second details the marriage of a cousin, and the
threatened appearance of an estranged branch of the family at the ceremony; the
third rounds off the cycle with the death of the family matriarch, the boys
grandmother. Together they offer an intimate insight into a community
negotiating the conflict between tradition and modernity, and the complex
tribal affiliations of the extended family.
